The printer industry has engaged in a continuing effort to provide high quality, printing at affordable prices. Such printers include color or black-and-white printing on substrates such as paper or textile in standard or wide format. Such high quality, dependable devices have tended to be extremely expensive especially in the inkjet printer industry.
High quality inkjet printing has usually depended upon a number of factors well known to one of ordinary skill in the art. Such factors include, but are not limited to, knowledge about the accuracy and appropriateness of certain inks and certain ink colors upon certain substrates in a myriad of environments for a host of applications. Further, assuming the proper ink and substrate are chosen for the proper application in the chosen environment, the inkjet printer also requires a carefully manufactured platen including an extremely flat printing surface.
A well manufactured platen includes a printing surface parallel with a print head comprising a jet plate which moves along a guide shaft. To achieve the precision required in dependable, high quality inkjet printing, the printing surface is preferred to be uniformly flat across its entire surface to within very small tolerance. Further, the guide shaft and the jet plate are preferred to be parallel relative to the printing surface also to within very small tolerances.
In the prior art, dependable, high quality inkjet printers typically require a metal platen. Metal is preferred in such a situation because of the accuracy to which metals can be cast, extruded or machined to provide the uniform flatness required of the printing area.
Molded plastic platens, although less expensive than metal, tend not to be uniformly flat to within the very tight tolerances preferred in high quality inkjet printing. Plastic printing surfaces may suffer from imperfections in manufacture, bending, and warping. With time or in environments conducive to the warping of plastics, such bending and warping may occur naturally, may be due to a physical trauma, or may be due to a sustained pressure over time. Finally, the need for uniformly flat printing surfaces and the maintenance to within a very tight tolerance of a uniform distance between the printing surface and the print head becomes even more acute in wide-format inkjet printing where even minor imperfections in either the uniform flatness of the printing surface or the parallelism of the moving jet plate become magnified causing distortions and other inaccuracies in the printing output. Thus, plastic platens under such conditions are not useful for dependable, high quality printing.